How I Met Your Mother

Kids, I have told you dozens of stories over the years that have moved from Point A to Point B with hopefully some kind of moral at the end. Out of all of the stories you have heard up to this moment, none are more important than what happened last Sunday night on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.

For full effect, download “And There She Was” by The Solids and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

I think I am somewhat of a wise man. What I mean is, I have picked up a few pieces of wisdom in the three decades I’ve been wandering around on God’s green Earth. I can change a tire on my own car, I know the difference between subsidized and unsubsidized student loans, I can look up at the night sky and point out a handful of constellations, I can even tie a bowtie on a good day. I think it’s safe to say that I know some things here and there. Despite all of that, last Sunday night as a pretty girl and I sat in a dirty restaurant off Bourbon Street eating $50 salads, laughing at how New Orleans was the equivalent of the devil’s anus, I sat with my sweaty palms under the table trying to figure out what I was going to say to this girl. 

“Let’s get out of this place.” I said.  She stared back with a puzzled look on her face.

“What do you mean lets get out of here? We just got to New Orleans.”

Valid point. We did just pull in to the most disgusting city in the history of humanity. A place that makes Las Vegas look like a G-rated movie. A town that is the closest creation to what Hell will look like in the afterlife. As the seconds ticked on and my brain scrambled for an answer, I just knew we had to get out of this dump.

“I don’t know, let’s uh…lets just uh…go for a drive or something? Maybe? Maybe go umm…out to the lake?” I said. 

Nailed it. She had no idea what I was about to do. That confused/perplexed/WTF look on her face meant she’s not suspecting ANYTHING out of the ordinary. I, Brock Bybee, was a genius. That’s a cold hard fact.

“Uh…sure. Let’s um…go for a drive.” She said. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw her swipe a salad fork and put it into her purse for protection, but no, my mind was just playing tricks on me.

Cut to a mid-sized rental car on Interstate 10 being pummeled by a thunderstorm the size of Mongolia with two young kids sitting in trepidation going 17 miles an hour on a freeway with our flashers on like the rest of the city.

“Maybe we should just go back to the hotel?” She said. “This weather is crazy!”

“No! This is nothing. I’ve seen plenty worse storms than this.” I lied kids, I had never seen worse storms than that. It felt like Hurricane Katrina’s big sister was unloading her bowels on this city all over again. Despite the weather, I knew for certain I was not going to drive back to the hotel without asking this pretty girl a single, simple question. A question that would change the course of both our lives forever. That last line sounds cliché, I know. But it was the direction both of us were heading.

Cut to the paved walkway on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain where two crazy kids with no one else around stood with each other looking out at the water. The rain had stopped but the storm had not, and lightning flashes were dancing around us every 30 seconds. It was like a glimpse from a Bob Ross painting. Seriously, not a better setting for what would happen next. You want to find a more romantic scene than two people standing on a beach with a lightning storm going on and no one else around? That stuff would make Putin intoxicated with love. 

“So when do you think would be a good day to get married?” I asked her as we stood there watching the lightning. She hesitated to answer, probably because this was the first time in the history of our relationship I had ever brought up the M-word without making the entire situation morbidly uncomfortable.

“I don’t know, there are plenty of days to pick. This isn’t something we need to talk about right now. There are so many other things that have to happen first before we start thinking about this. So…I don’t know?”

“You’re right.” I said. “We might as well get those small things out of the way.”

And with that I knelt down before her, looked up in to her eyes and said the most famous four-letter phrase uttered by millions of scared-stiff men holding a small box in their hands.

“Will You Marry Me?”

This is the part where this pretty girl looked at me with an unexpected look of surprise but a gentle smile on her face. She wasn’t taking me serious.

“But you don’t even have a ring.” She said.

For a moment I was confused. However it took me a split second to realize that me, a 6’5” giant kneeling down to meet her 5’3” gaze, this was the first time in our history we had actually been eye level, therefore she was now looking directly into my eyes, and not down at the small box I was holding in my hands.

“Well if you’d look down there’s a big one right in front of your face.” I said with a smile.

Cue sudden rush of emotions, followed by tears in her eyes, hands over her face, and the shocking reality that this moment, the moment that every girl dreams about when they’re young, the moment they will cherish until they take their last breath, that defining pinnacle moment of taking a leap into the unknown with another person, was now happening to her. With lightning blazing and rain beginning to spatter, I was on one knee asking this girl to change her last name and become my wife. 

“So uh…yes? No? Maybe?” I said after 15 seconds of silence.

“Yes! Of course yes!” She said back finally after catching her breath.

And that was it. We stood on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain holding each other, kissing each other, knowing that things were heading in the right direction. That no matter what happened in the future, we would make it out alright because we had finally found one another. If you would have told me six months ago that I would be standing at this point with this girl in my arms, I would never have believed you. But kids, that’s the funny thing about life. Things never really go according to plan. We don’t always know the answers to the problems that get thrown at us. We just have to buckle down for the long haul and push our way through all the chaos until the answer comes blooming out of nowhere. 

You see the one thing I never could figure out in all my years was what I needed to do to fall in love with someone. There’s no uniform answer for that of course, but for years I’ve been trying to solve that puzzle. Everyone has a different way they do it. And mine was as unique as they come. All I had to do was move to St. George so I could go back to school after my mission. Go on a double date with the wrong girl. Total a car. Nearly drown in a reservoir. Graduate from college. Have brain surgery. Start working as a recruiter. Move up north so I could live on the road. Start watching HIMYM. Date the wrong girl. Send an accidental text message. Fail the GRE. Move back to St. George. Become a professor. Run a marathon. Then an Ironman. Move into my first house. Date the wrong girl. Date the wrong girl again. Date the wrong girl a few more times. Watch your Aunt Danielle and Uncle Jared get married in Cabo. Pass the GRE. Apply to grad school. Date the wrong girl for the last time. Talk to the big man upstairs a few times here and there. Go to a Dixie State basketball game and meet up with a pretty girl who went out with my best friend on that same double date nine years ago. Turn to her at halftime with a lump in my throat and butterflies in my stomach and just start talking to her.

See? Easy. And that kids, is how I met your mother.

Call Me Peggy

So remember that one time when I used to write on this thing called a blog? 

For full effect, download "Changes" by David Bowie and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post. 

Seriously people, I sound like a cookie cutter mid-30's stay-at-home Mother named Peggy with three kids who just washed either chocolate or poop from her split-end littered hair, when I say the words "Here's a new post on my blog, just love me and send uplifting comments about my stay at home life. Please! I need your attention!" That's who I am now. My name is Peggy, and I have a problem. I have relapsed from publishing bi-weekly chronicles about my above-awesome life as a 30-year old college recruiter and transformed into not caring about self-imposed deadlines and pleasing a few hundred people with social media advertisements. What the Hell is wrong with me?! 

For years this blog has been my outlet, my release, the vodka martini I would sip in doses to release my creative juices or whatever moronic metaphor you want to use for me writing this. This blog was my priority. It was, well, my life. And it has been for the last five years. Every single event that has happened since I gave that divorced ginger a tub of ice cream for her birthday has been marked on Randomity. This blog has been my life partner. And I felt guilty as a Catholic bishop when I missed a day, let alone a week publishing. But now all that has changed. This blog has become just another blog. Just another website. A domain name that will be forgotten in years to come when push comes to shove. And I am now just another Peggy who will publish something slightly above mediocre once every three months. Never thought this day would come, but the fat lady inside me is about to be unleashed. 

The unavoidable reality is that life is full of blogs like this. Things that were once important, vital, that were held in the highest regard to us are now just meaningless piles of scrap tossed into a metal bin with the initials WM spray-painted on the side. Things change, they always do. Not that there is anything wrong or disturbing with change, because honestly change is incredible. There is just a dampening feeling at times when you realize you are morphing into something that will join the hordes of Peggy's across the country that have new priorities on their plates. Priorities like other people, and school, and a bunch of other grown up stuff that haunts people into having a mid-life crisis. Don't be confused, I'm not throwing in the towel on this blog by any means. I'll still check in to make you laugh and cry and teach you valuable lessons that have guided the course of my life and may give you a dose of advice here and there. But this blog, it doesn't matter anymore. This blog is just a bunch of helter-skelter letters thrown together, doused with sarcasm, chock full of movie references.

This blog doesn't mean that much to me anymore. A pretty girl holding a yellow umbrella 252 miles away from me, she does though. And she means more to me than this blog ever will. 

Life is crazy kids, that's all I can say.

This Makes No Sense

Kids, right now I'm sitting in front of a class of students who are taking the final exam for the Interpersonal Communication course I taught this semester. Yes, actual people are taking a test that I wrote for a class that I taught. I'm not saying this to boost my ego, I'm saying this because holy freaking curse word, I am the mediator for how a student's academic future will look like. 

There has to be something wrong here. 

For full effect, download "Something's Wrong" by Eric Benet, and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

You may be saying to yourself, WTF is going on in your life Brock? Where have you been? What happened with the consistency in your blogs? I know, I know, these last few weeks I have fallen off the social media radar and drifted into some type of digital purgatory, focusing solely on building relationships with actual people. That's crazy talk, tell me about it. Something people only born in the 1980's know about. But to be honest with you, I have no idea what's going on in my life right now. I mean, I do, but I don't. That makes no sense to you really, but let's be honest, it makes no sense that I am behind a computer assigning grades to my students while they wrap up their finals. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever! We're talking about a kid who once had a seizure in this exact classroom and accidentally punched a hole in the front of a laptop while as an undergrad, now being given the keys to another human's academic development. Something has to be wrong here. 

I will admit, I am very uncomfortable at this stage of my life. There, I said it. Things just don't make sense. Not logically, emotionally, mentally, any way you look at them, this is all some kind of jumbled mix of what appears to be erratic decisions and leaps of faith. I'm not in my "zone" as the sports world coins the phrase. Cue Johnny Thunder and his baritone voice reciting a play-by-play narrative of the NBA Finals. Please don't confuse the previous two sentences as my cry for help that an impending panic attack is on the horizon, all I am saying is that things at this point of my life do not, and I repeat, do not make sense. But then again, since when do I have to make sense about everything that happens? 

Kids, I know I've tried to teach you a number of lessons with this online journal. Things like how you need to be your actual, true self in a relationship with another person, or how you need to listen more than you talk because frankly people won't care about you, or how Costco is a hidden gem of a cult that all of us need to bow down and worship. I have tried to sell pieces of both wisdom and crap to a handful of creatures that are still waiting to be made. And no, this isn't going to be yet another moral breakthrough that I want you to write on a piece of rustic leather and post to Pinterest, (does that even exist anymore). 

I guess all I'm saying is that right now in my life, things do not make sense. They just don't. They are a chaotic wreck of possible events that I have no stinking idea as to how will pan out. I am uncomfortable with where my life is going. And I'm okay with that. Shit's about to go down, and I'm not pressing the panic button. Call me crazy, but I am comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

Go ahead and sell that last line to Pinterest, it's gold I tell you.